Best of Enemies

In the 1960s, the most trusted news source was network television. Folks of all political colors and stripes trusted Walter Cronkite. He would give your family the day's facts and move on. In 2015, most of us have one specific news channel we turn to (in the rare moment we’re not checking the news on our mobile devices) and consider programming on competing stations as opinions, biased, or even outright lies. The 24-hour news cycle was inevitable, but were we always on a crash course for news outlets for the left and news outlets for the right? How did Walter Cronkite morph into Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann? One possibility for the catalyst may by the volatile 1968 presidential conventions and the 10 debate sparring match between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal. 50 years ago, professional political pundits were less brand names and more known commodities of the intelligentsia. Nowadays, most pundits are paid talking heads filtering any and all facts through their peculiar political prisms. There were no cable channels devoted to specific camps, there were only CBS, NBC, and perpetually last place ABC. As the networks prepared to broadcast first the Republican convention from Miami and the Democratic convention from Chicago, ABC chose to hire Buckley and Vidal for $10,000 each, a considerable sum in 1968 dollars, to recap and debate one another each night after the convention wrapped for the day. Neither ABC nor any prognosticator realized how influential those debates would become and their direct influence on television news.

Directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville spent five years researching, watching, interviewing, and dissecting these 10 debates from all angles. Wisely, they do not just air the debates from start to finish; only the juiciest and fiercest segments are edited into the final product. Neville, a recent Best Documentary Oscar winner for 20 Feet from Stardom, and Gordon, show us the brief life and times of Buckley and Vidal, their respective places in the 1960s zeitgeist, and how much they already loathed one another before they shared a stage.

Buckley and Vidal were eloquent, intellectual giants. They could grab hold of any opinion or argument and tear it to shreds in under a minute. The 1960s was certainly their only decade to flourish; today, less talented hacks would label them elitist and shun them for their haughty accents and obvious book smarts. Today’s political theater has no room for the most qualified to wittily discuss issues and trade high-minded barbs, that might interrupt the indignant yelling and vile denunciations of whoever the opposition is that day. Buckley and Vidal did more than influence today’s punditry, look at network convention coverage and even Saturday Night Live’s news anchor desk. All networks hire late night duos to summarize the day’s convention events and Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin were direct rip-offs of Buckley and Vidal.

The 10 debates, broken up into 15 minute segments and presided over by ABC anchor Howard K. Smith, were not by definition debates at all; they were absurdist comedy. The rules of engagement were ad hominum and personal attacks rather than point/counter-point. Both verbal masters arrived with their scripted insults locked and loaded, Vidal certainly the greater antagonist of the two. These gentlemen did not just consider the other a political opposite. The other man and his views were more than dangerous, perhaps even evil. Their mutual animosity grows and ferments and the debates progress in animosity until the ultimate insult is thrown; one which I will not spoil here.

Though Buckley and Vidal influenced future television news, I do not believe they influenced future pundits. Who could be the duo’s intellectual heir today? Vidal’s obvious successor was Christopher Hitchens, who briefly shows up as an interviewee, but now that Hitchens has passed on, there is a glaring lack of pure, intelligent, and most of all, eloquent, political speech in today’s crisis-of-the-minute showcase. Best of Enemies unintentionally reflects today’s baffling aversion to those commentators considered intellectual superstars; they are not embraced, only accused of looking down upon the layman. Talk shows and ‘news’ programs schedule Ann Coulter and James Carville instead of today’s Buckleys and Vidals. Political speech is no longer eloquent, it is more verbal ignorance.

Best of Enemies is a gripping history lesson, especially for those of us not around and politically aware in 1968. If you do not know how the debates ended and the ensuing fallout, do yourself a favor and don’t google it, go see the film and dream of a time when one news anchor unified these United States and not everything was red vs. blue.